The federal government continues to move toward the creation of a national pharmacare program.
The 2019 budget announced Tuesday includes plans to create a new Canadian Drug Agency.
The federal government says the new agency will help negotiate better drug prices and drive down the cost of medication for Canadians by up to $3 billion in the long term.
The plan also involves creating a central list of drugs considered cost-effective and a strategy to lower the price of high-cost drugs used to treat rare diseases.
Pharmacist Tim Brady, who own's 'Brady's Drug Store' in Belle River and Essex, is calling the strategy a "proactive approach" to tackling the high cost of medicine.
He says patient care should always be priority one.
"At the end of the day as a pharmacist, or any pharmacist in Essex County, our focus is always going to be on patient care," says Brady. "So if we can have less discussion about costs of medications and more discussions about your health, it's better for everybody at the end of the day. But at the same time, it is a business and we have to make sure that we can create a model that's funded properly."
The federal government says prescription-drug spending in Canada has spiked over the past 30 years, up from $2.6 billion in 1985 to $33.7 billion in 2018.
Brady says the aging population is growing and having trouble paying for its medication.
"The biggest issue with the growth is these new medications called biologics. There's treatments for things like rheumatoid arthritis that could be $3,000, $4,000 or $5,000 a month," he says. But hopefully they can get all the provinces on board and at the end of the day, we can make sure that Canadians are getting the best health care they can at a really reasonable price."
But Brady also notes that putting together a national strategy will be no easy feat.
"You've got ten individual provinces and the territories all doing their own thing, so it's going to be hard to corral them," he says. "The first step is let's take our buying power and make sure that all the provinces are getting the best pricing, then it's taking a look at what other type of synergistic things can we do to help streamline the system, so everybody benefits."
The plan comes after a federally struck expert panel issued a report laying out what it called the "building blocks" of pharmacare, including the recommendation that Ottawa oversee an agency to roll out a national drug plan.
In its last budget before the October election, the Liberal government is spending $200-million more than anticipated bringing the projected deficit to $19.8-billion for the 2019-2020 fiscal year.
With files from Peter Langille